Page 28 of Crow’s Shadow

“The girl.”

Loco straightens.

Buck’s head comes up.

Grim squares his shoulders back.

“What girl?”

The man swallows. “The one Renner took.”

I move close enough that he tries to push himself through the back of the chair.

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“What happens day after tomorrow?”

“He moves her.”

“Where?”

“The mountain place. First light. That’s what I heard. I swear. First fucking light.”

“Who goes with her?” Loco asks.

The first words he has spoken since we came through the door.

The man’s eyes snap to him. “I—I don’t know.”

Loco takes one step forward. “You better.”

“I swear. Renner keeps that shit tight. I just heard the move. First light, day after tomorrow. Cannery to the mountain. That’s all I fucking know.”

I stare at him.

Day after tomorrow. My eyes go to the open garage door, where morning is already graying the river. Tonight and tomorrow. Two nights before they take her out of the cannery.

“Crow.” Grim’s voice is careful now, the way a brother talks when he isn’t sure how much of you is still listening. “Brother. He’s done. He gave it up. It’s over.”

“Not yet.”

“He’s breathing. Loco said breathing.” A beat, and something in Grim’s tone I have never once heard aimed at me in fifteen years. “This isn’t clean. This is cruelty.”

The blue flame hisses between us. Colt is dead on the dock, Shadow is two nights before Renner takes her somewhere we may never find, and the bastard in front of me helped put both of them there.

“He put his rounds through a nineteen-year-old at the quiet door.” My voice comes out low and wrong. “Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. It’s written on our own goddamn wall.”

“That’s the motto. It was never meant to sound like this.”

I do the thing anyway. Grim does not stop me, and Grim has stopped me before. When it is finished the garage is very quiet. The man is not breathing, and I have broken the one clear order my president gave me, and I know exactly what I’ve done.

I kill the torch. The silence rings.

“We take Colt home,” I say. “He rides in the hearse, up front, with us. Not in the back. He doesn’t ride in the back.”

Grim looks at me across the dead man in the chair, across the line I have walked over and cannot walk back. Whatever is in his face is not disgust and it is not fear. It is grief, the same grief that was in Loki’s wet eyes, the same one Mercy tried to warn me about at the mouth of the furnace with his hand on my shoulder. Make sure there’s a man left for her to come home to.